Category: News

Expos and Spring

Me at Calgary Expo 2023

I’m around, honest! It just seems that long form blogging ends up on the backburner and so here we are! Making The Post apologizing for being out of touch which, I’m told, you are not supposed to do.

Doing it anyways.

I live in a place that has a real winter and some years it seems to go on much too long. This was one such year! Spring finally hit mid April for real and we are now in the headlong rush towards complaining about how hot it is rather than about how cold it is! My studio will finally be warm – and occasionally too warm – for a few months before we restart the cycle. I am looking forward to doing pottery in my ceramics corner when I don’t have to layer up to stay toasty while getting mud EVERYWHERE.

Spring is also the season for whatever spring shows I signed up for! The last few years (except the COVID YEARS) that’s been the Calgary Fan Expo and the Etsy Spring Market. This year the Saskatoon Expo is right after the Calgary one – this weekend in fact! – and I’ll be off to that tomorrow with my little polymer clay goods and my new ceramic pieces. The show is in the second year under new management so I’m looking forward to giving it a try. It used to be as good a show, for me, as the much larger Calgary one and a fraction of the cost. The new management is obviously unused to running this sort of event so it’s having some growing pains but I’m hoping it’ll get back to it’s heyday. It’s nice to get these big, fun, events to sell at comparatively close by. I’ll be in booth 605 in the artist alley if you’re around! Come visit!

To wrap up my spring show season I’ll be back in Saskatoon for the Etsy team spring market on June 4th. I’m part of the organizing crew for this one and it’s outside so it’s always exciting to see what obstacles we’ll have. As a rule, it goes well and we recover from the insanity fairly quickly.

booth place at sask entertainment expo

There’s a Shop Now and New Year’s Updates

I’ve gone and done it. The latest incarnation of my web site shop is going to be a Shopify one. I’m sticking it in as a subdomain or a linked outside page (whatever I get to work). It’s going to be a bit different looking than the primary site but I’ll nerd that one out over time.

The plan is to release new items to my own site first then the remains to Etsy. And my non cane, non bead art will be on my personal site (that’s this one!). I love Etsy and will continue using them but they are becoming as expensive and tedious to use as other options and they’re no longer the friendly fluffy folks I joined up with. Which is FINE. It’s work. It does make for less guilt in exploring other options 🙂

So, check out the shop, let me know if you find weird glitches or if there’s stuff you KNOW I make but isn’t listed, yet. And, as always, thanks so much for being fans of the stuff I make!

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Other notes: I’ll be removing some of the hard core discounts Etsy sort of forces vendors into, most notably the free shipping for US orders over $35. Etsy is going to ding me for it but this way I can keep from bumping prices up nearly as much and continue to do occasional sales for everyone.

The First Shop Update is Coming

In the spirit of trying to organize better in 2022 I’m going to move to a monthly shop update type schedule. I’ll still refill items in my shops as they sell out, if I still have stock, but I’ll be saving fresh batches and the general release of new work until the shop updates. The May one is going to be a small update of new work, new batches of sold out designs, updated photos of existing work and other mayhem. June will be a bunch of new houseplant, cats, and bird canes and beads. July will be, at least, the soft release of the fall season handmade supplies such as the first round of Halloween goodies.

It’ll be a way to batch all the parts of shop upkeep I keep putting off and doing randomly like photo taking, listing updates, social media updates, and just MAKING stuff.

All that said the first one will be May 14th, the Saturday after Mother’s Day! I’ll have fresh batches of cardinal beads, monarch butterfly canes, the new setup for my cane samplers, the latest version of my blackbird beads, some new jewellery… and a variety of other small refills and updates. This first update will just be in my Etsy shops but hopefully, in the future, I’ll get to adding to my site first and then my Etsy shops the next day.